Nevada’s meeting, for all the important names on the Zoom call, turned out to be just another multitasking opportunity. You wrapped up the week’s progress report, clicked aimlessly through your calendar a few times. Every time you tuned in–usually in response to the DoD Deputy Secretary’s reedy but humorless drawl–you understood what was being said, albeit not why. You probably could have answered the guy’s questions if you were able to get a clarifying question in edgewise, but it didn’t much matter–Nevada did all the talking.
It couldn’t exactly have been an email. They seemed like they were discussing important things. Those discussions just didn’t include you–or half the call’s muted attendees–except for the fifteen-second adrenaline rush when Nevada asked you to do some research to provide context for one of the Deputy Secretary’s finicky, probably irrelevant questions. You piped up to say yes, absolutely, you’ll look into it and get back to them. You added it to your to-do list, seventh from the top, figured it was maybe a 20% chance you’d get to it before everyone forgot the question entirely, it being probably irrelevant and all.
The rest of the day was a blur. Nothing you had to do was all that high of a priority, so accordingly, you didn’t do much. Falling asleep at your desk earlier had really put you in a weird mood, and the clarity with which you remembered your dream was making it very easy to get distracted by anything at all. And then Tyler cornered you in the break room to talk to you about the Notre Dame game over the weekend. Neither of you attended Notre Dame–though you did give him shit after they lost once, which he inexplicably took as an invitation to infodump. Nor do you follow football, and based on the quality of his commentary, you think he might as well not either. Anyway, by the time you extricated yourself, the day was basically done. It wasn’t a good Monday, even for a Monday.
The subway ride back to your apartment was normal, up to a point. It was a little less crowded than usual, the standard mix of exhausted salary-earners, errand runners, vagrants, and goth or costumed weirdos whose bizarre appearances all but dared an inquiry into what their deal was, exactly. This was all standard up until the stop before yours, where your car evacuated in its entirety, leaving just you standing, awkward, offset from the only other remaining passenger. It was one of the weirdos, apparently a literal hunchback, bedecked in a black, distressed, fantasy-esque cloak which covered their downturned head, slumped over in one of the handicapped seats.
You felt a bit dizzy, overwhelmed by the sudden unplanned surplus of choice, and just sat in the nearest open seat. The humming that picked up in your ears as the train began moving again made you glad you did. It felt like a sort of psychedelic rainbow, synesthetic, an overwhelming spectrum of aural frequencies altogether inappropriate for the reverberations of a subway car, and you were just about zeroing in on a certainty that you’d come down with something serious and maybe needed to call in sick to work tomorrow when a deep, feathery voice cut through the humming, accented but mercifully undistorted:
“‘The mind is its own place and in it self…Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.’” There was a pause, then: “That is what your Milton said, is it not?”
You tried to look around, half expecting your stomach to spasm your lunch onto the floor. But thankfully, while you were still kind of unclear on where “up” was, nausea wasn’t setting in just yet. You noticed that the hooded passenger seemed to have adjusted their posture, not to face you, exactly, but to angle the top of their downturned head in your direction.
No, wait. Wait a fucking minute. In the blurry, visual doubling, you caught a glimpse, some sort of impaired recall. The hood wasn’t shrouding a downturned head: This fucker had a snout. The silhouette was just like those rat people from your dream. And whether it was coincidence or a deliberate confirmation of some recognition spreading to your face, the passenger lifted two four-fingered hands to its head and drew back the hood.
“Have you already forgotten your nature, devil? Or are you merely surprised to find we can reach you here?”
Yeah, it was a rat. But this one was way more fucked up than the ones in your dream. Its fur was black, matted, probably disgusting, broken intermittently by scabs and…oh god, was that fungus? Branching, seemingly gelatinous, polychromatic tendrils that looked kind of like that zombie ant fungus from that one TV show, growing out of its nose, its mangled eye sockets, the gaps you could see between the yellow teeth in its open mouth.
“What?” is what you managed to get out. You were still betting even money that this was some sort of hallucination–or another variation of unreality–but even with that aside, you just weren’t sure how to respond. You still couldn’t see straight, and a rat with a brain parasite was calling you a devil on the subway.
The rat wheezed. Or maybe it was a growl. The thing really didn’t look so good.
“You were called for a purpose,” it said, climbing to its feet. “Wake up. Find your chains. We still have need of you.”
Then you were all but thrown horizontal by the subway’s rapid deceleration. The doors opened, and the rat limped off the train, its gait seeming neither human nor rodentine. You willed yourself to your feet to follow, partly out of morbid curiosity at the creature’s nonsensical command, partly because, well, this was your stop. You made it to the door via sheer momentum before you tripped on the threshold and ate shit on the platform outside. You laid there, gravity’s unwillingness to find purchase on your inner ear taking precedence over your pursuit of the maybe-imaginary rat, though before the vertigo diminished entirely, a prodding at your shoulder roused your attention.
“You alright mate?”
The question came from a slightly overweight cop, standing over you with an expression you felt might be somewhat less emotive than your sorry state of affairs warranted.
“Yeah, sorry. I think so,” you mumbled.
“Well get up then,” the cop said, without any other visible reaction. “You can’t sleep here.” He continued on along the platform without another glance as you heaved yourself to your feet, vaguely annoyed at how he could possibly think you were sleeping.
But perhaps catatonia did have something to do with it. Glancing about the station, you couldn’t see the rat anywhere, and there was little you could imagine doing about it other than sleeping–thoroughly, uninterrupted this time–as soon as you got home.
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